From waste to wealth: Europe’s textile opportunity – POLITICO

Europe is a world leader in recycling, but currently only a fraction of its post-consumer textile waste is reused or valorized in some form; the rest piles up in landfills, is incinerated or moves through low-value export routes that obscure where the material ends up and who pays. In 2025, just 1.5 million tons out of 13.3 million tons of post-consumer textile waste were collected and sorted.

Textile waste has grown rapidly alongside the rise of fast fashion brands. Each European consumer buys about 95 pieces of textiles annually, up 12 percent since 2019. The average EU citizen discarded 25 kg of textiles in 2025 — a volume that, without a functioning system, becomes a recurring household and municipal cost rather than a recoverable material stream. Cheap and low-quality fashion is seen as disposable, which has created a major waste issue, and producers are not incentivized to change their ways.

With recent innovations in textile-to-textile recycling, synthetic textile waste has the potential to become the feedstock for a genuinely circular European textile value chain. Capturing and reusing that material would not only preserve natural resources and reduce waste, but also support rebuilding the EU’s industrial base and economic sovereignty. If this is to happen, Europe needs to use the forthcoming Circular Economy Act to recognize textiles as a critical resource and establish a coherent framework across the bloc that supports collection, sorting, reuse and high-quality recycling at scale.